Exploring mobile health applications for infectious disease self-monitoring among travelers: Trends, themes, and future directions

Abstract

Background: The objective of the study is to describe the trend of traveler infectious disease issue, define techniques for including traveler self-monitoring on a mobile application, and offer suggestions for creating traveler infectious disease self-monitoring applications in order to use state-of-the-art research principles. Systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis was conducted using the VOS viewer software analytical tools. The records used in this exploration study were those released between 2018 and 2023 that were collected based on the keywords “travelers’ application,” or “infectious disease”. Database screening yield 4467 results and it analyzed 73 journals from the PubMed database using the descriptive-analytic method. The study on traveler applications on infectious disease revealed four clusters of dominant themes: epidemiological infection disease, mobile health applications, social determinant and impact of mobile app infectious disease. This study also looked at research trends by year. Current research themes concern one practical way to get behavioral and health data from older travelers and people with chronic illnesses who are traveling using a smartphone app. Impact of mobile app infectious disease could lead to a reduction in exposure, an increase in prophylaxis, and a possible lessening of the strain on the healthcare system. The other big concern includes security and privacy of their mobile devices as well as the uniformity of the data source. Through bibliometric analysis and overlay visualization, the researchers summarized seven top articles cited and four big themes research during observation year. These findings could be useful for future research recommendation as quickly evolving subject.